“But [at our reinspection] in 2018, the audit process came out as a strength.”

However, the planned changes, which will save an estimated £7,000 per year, were criticised by Labour committee member, Sobia Malik.

“It’s really hard to keep [a] level of objectivity [about your performance] when you are working so hard - and the external audit helps you keep that frame of reference,” County Cllr Malik said.

But Sally Allen insisted that the authority’s own assessment process had proved that an added layer of scrutiny was no longer necessary.

“When OFSTED visited in June, we had to do an audit of 20 cases - and they agreed with our own findings. That’s a very different conversation to the one we were having in 2015,” she said.

The most recent OFSTED report - which upgraded Lancashire County Council’s children’s services from “inadequate” to “requires improvement” - concluded that lessons were being learned from internal audits, but added that “greater consistency is not yet in place across the service”.

The Local Government Association has also been giving feedback on the quality of the county council’s own audits over the past two years and now “agrees with what [is being] found”, committee members were told.

The proposal to end the external audit process will be put before full council at its budget meeting next February.